US will
impose costs on Russia for cyber ‘acts of aggression,’ White
House cybersecurity czar says

Russia will be made to pay for its acts of cyber
aggression on the international stage, Rob Joyce, special assistant
to the president and White House cybersecurity coordinator, told CNBC
on Friday.

The act in question was the malware attack known
as NotPetya that wiped out billions of dollars as it spread across 64
countries in July 2017. The White House, for the first time
Thursday, directly
blamed Russia's military for the attack.

I have a hard time remembering names. Perhaps
this technology would help?

“Face recognition—fast becoming law
enforcement’s surveillance tool of choice—is being implemented
with little oversight or privacy protections, leading to faulty
systems that will disproportionately impact people of color and may
implicate innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit, says an
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report
released today. Face recognition is rapidly creeping into modern
life, and face recognition systems will one day be capable of
capturing the faces of people, often without their knowledge, walking
down the street, entering stores, standing in line at the airport,
attending sporting events, driving their cars, and utilizing public
spaces. Researchers at the Georgetown Law School estimated
that one in every two American adults—117 million people—are
already in law enforcement face recognition systems. This kind of
surveillance will have a chilling effect on Americans’ willingness
to exercise their rights to speak out and be politically engaged, the
report says. Law enforcement has already used face recognition at
political protests, and may soon use face recognition with body-worn
cameras, to identify people in the dark, and to
project what someone might look like from a police sketch or even a
small sample of DNA…”

Many vendors of biometrics-based
solutions have not anticipated legal and compliance challenges posed
by their products, or expressly deny responsibility for those
challenges, leading to increased legal action, according to the
National Law Review. The article “Buyer
Beware: Facial Recognition and the Current Legal Landscape”
urges U.S. retailers to be prepared for consumer privacy laws to
evolve as they consider implementing such technologies.

The article was authored by partners of
law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, and compares the current
context for biometrics with that of the earliest text messaging
marketing programs.

Hackers armed with destructive malware
appear to have compromised the main IT service provider for the
Winter Olympic Games months before last week’s highly publicized
cyberattack.

Publicly
available evidence analyzed by experts and reviewed by CyberScoop
suggests that whoever deployed the Olympic
Destroyer malware on Feb. 9 likely previously penetrated a series
of computer systems around December belonging to Atos, a
multinational information technology service provider that is hosting
the cloud infrastructure for the Pyeongchang games.

Contractors,
governments,
and telecom
giants have all previously left data on exposed Amazon Web
Services (AWS) servers, meaning anyone can access
them without a username or password. Now, a search engine
makes combing through leaky AWS datasets that much easier. Think of
it as a barebones Google, but for info that the owners may have
mistakenly published to the world.

Google quietly ran a test of new technology to
make it easier for 911 operators to locate cellphone callers, and 911
centers that participated said the results were promising.

The nation’s existing 911 system, which turns 50
this month, has struggled with the explosion of cellphones. The
vast majority of 911 calls these days are made using a cellphone, but
the location of the caller is hard to pinpoint. Federal regulators
estimate shaving a minute off response times could save as many
10,000 lives each year.

… Market researcher Strategy
Analytics has just released its estimates for the smartphone
market in the fourth quarter, and the numbers show that Apple has
just hit a ridiculously impressive milestone: The iPhone maker just
took over half of all global smartphone revenue.
Specifically, Apple grabbed
51% revenue share, with Samsungcoming in at a distant No. 2.

The other day, my students were wondering how
anyone could compete with Amazon or Walmart…

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.